How Chess works

You win by delivering checkmate — attacking the enemy king in a way it cannot escape by moving, blocking, or capturing the attacker. A king is never actually captured and never moves into check. Games also end by resignation, which is how most decisive games between strong players finish.

Each piece has a fixed movement pattern, and the interaction between those patterns is the entire game. Pieces capture by moving onto an occupied square, with the pawn as the sole exception.

• King — one square in any direction
• Queen — any distance, straight or diagonal
• Rook — any distance, straight only
• Bishop — any distance, diagonally only, so it never leaves its starting colour
• Knight — an L-shape, and the only piece that jumps over others
• Pawn — one square forward, two on its first move, capturing diagonally

Three rules break the normal patterns, and all three exist to keep openings and endgames from becoming sterile.

• Castling — king and rook move simultaneously to tuck the king behind pawns
• En passant — a pawn advancing two squares can be captured as if it moved one
• Promotion — a pawn reaching the far rank becomes any piece, almost always a queen

Roughly half of games between evenly matched strong players are drawn, which is a feature of the game's depth rather than a flaw. There are five distinct ways to reach one.

• Stalemate — the player to move has no legal move but is not in check
• Insufficient material — neither side can force mate
• Threefold repetition of the same position
• The fifty-move rule — no capture or pawn move in fifty moves
• Agreement between the players

Chess games are conventionally divided into opening, middlegame and endgame. The opening is heavily analysed and often memorised twenty moves deep. The middlegame is where plans and tactics decide most games. The endgame, with few pieces left, is closer to a solved technical exercise — and is where amateur play falls apart most often.

Competitive chess is played against a clock, and the time control changes the character of the game completely. Classical games run for hours; bullet games give each player one minute for the entire game. Running out of time loses, regardless of the position.

• Classical — 90 minutes or more per player, plus increments
• Rapid — typically 15 to 60 minutes each
• Blitz — 3 to 5 minutes each
• Bullet — under 3 minutes each

The Elo system assigns each player a number that predicts results between any two players. Beating someone rated higher gains more points than beating someone lower. FIDE awards permanent titles at rating thresholds, of which Grandmaster is the highest, requiring three strong tournament performances and a 2500 rating.